While delivering capabilities at speed is at the core of the Defense Department’s acquisition system shakeup, the department’s top acquisition official said the Pentagon is not “mandating speed.”
“We’re continually going to be dependent on the judgment of program leaders who are executing these programs to understand where does the need for speed balance with the risk that we would undertake to cost and/or performance of the system,” Michael Duffey, undersecretary of defense for acquisition and sustainment, told reporters Monday.
Last week, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced a series of initiatives to overhaul the department’s acquisition process as part of what he described as a broader war on Pentagon bureaucracy. Key changes include prioritizing a commercial-first approach, cutting red tape, increasing competition and bringing more commercial firms and nontraditional contractors into the defense space and transitioning program executive offices (PAO) to portfolio acquisition executives (PAE), which would give these new portfolio officials greater authorities and responsibilities for requirements, resourcing and acquisition.
Most of the changes Hegseth unveiled last Friday are similar to measures currently making their way through Congress.
In the Nov. 7 memo, Hegseth emphasized that speed will be at the center of this sweeping transformation the department is embarking on.
“The core principles of this transformation are simple: instill the warrior ethos in the acquisition workforce and enterprise, inject a sense of urgency and relentless focus on speed by empowering those directly responsible for delivery to make and own decisions, cut through unnecessary layers to focus the [Warfighting Acquisition System] on speed, accountability and mission outcomes, and prioritize flexible requirements and resource trades to enable timely delivery at the speed of relevance,” he wrote in the memo.
Duffey said while speed to capability delivery is key, given constant budgetary irregularities, his focus is on making the most of the department’s budget — optimizing the system to deliver the best capability at the greatest speed for the lowest cost.
“Those are the parameters we operate in, and that’s what we intend to empower the workforce to make the best judgments going forward,” Duffey said.
Portfolio acquisition executives, Duffey said, will be the ones responsible for striking the right balance between speed and risk, deciding when to accelerate and possibly cut corners to achieve speed or when to delay program delivery.
“We’re hoping to provide the flexibility to the portfolio acquisition executives to be able to move money around and to trade requirements. There’s certainly no question about the emphasis on speed but recognizing that there’s a need for judgment and flexibility in that triangle of cost schedule performance,” he said.
“One thing we’re doing around here nowadays is we’re now saying schedule performance cost instead of cost schedule performance just as a way of emphasizing the fact that speed is priority amongst us,” he added.
It’s unclear whether these portfolio acquisition executives will be the ones making that call — Duffey said the department is still working out those implementation details. “I think what you’ll find is there will be circumstances where they need to have a broader conversation, and there will be circumstances where the threshold will allow them to make that decision on their own,” he said.
Along with Hegseth’s “Transforming the Defense Acquisition System into the Warfighting Acquisition System to Accelerate Fielding of Urgently Needed Capabilities to Our Warriors” memo, the department also released the acquisition transformation strategy — five pillars laid out in the plan include expanding the industrial base; empowering the acquisition workforce to deliver at speed; introducing greater acquisition flexibility through cutting regulations and processes; developing high performance systems; and improving lifecycle risk management.
Hegseth’s memo already directed the services to begin carrying out a number of key initiatives that emerged from those five pillars.
One of the changes the department seeks to implement is replacing what it calls “redundant and excessive” studies like the Analysis of Alternatives (AoA) that the strategy says delays the start of programs. The process, which takes place early in the acquisition process and is mandated by Congress, is designed to compare operational effectiveness, suitability and life-cycle cost of alternatives.
The strategy calls for modifying those processes and providing “more rapid and impactful assessment of commercial solutions, existing technologies, and competing prototypes as a preferred approach to the extended document analysis.”
“I think that we can learn more from experimentation and prototyping than we can from an analysis of alternatives. We recognize there may be exceptional circumstances, specifically when it comes to large-scale weapon systems where we may need to do a study of what an alternative might be. But our intent is a heavy focus on prototyping and experimentation as the best learning and best connected to the art of cutting-edge technology,” Duffey said.
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